The legendary 1981 movie Sam Elliott sabotaged himself out of: “Who’s this cocky jerk?”
Although it feels like he’s cut from a similar cloth as Morgan Freeman and simply emerged into the world as an old man, Sam Elliott was young once, and he didn’t always do himself too many favours.
Thanks to his impressively formidable moustache and those unmistakeably dulcet tones of his, he’s always felt like an actor who’d do their best work once they’d gotten older, a sentiment he’s been proving entirely correct over the last couple of decades.
He’s been more ubiquitous in his 70s and 80s than he’s ever been, popping up in everything from blockbuster movies to awards-baiting dramas and more than a few prestige TV shows. He’s been acting since the late 1960s, but it says a lot that he didn’t receive any major awards recognition until three decades later.
Elliott wasn’t nominated for a Primetime Emmy until he was almost 60, he’d passed that benchmark by the time he was shortlisted for his first Golden Globe, and his solitary Academy Award nod came when he was closing in on 70, so we’re not wrong in suggesting he’s had to bide his time for recognition.
Being so outspoken didn’t do him any favours, and even cost him a role in one of the most iconic movies of its era, or any era, to be honest. In the 1980s, he admitted that he carried a “bad attitude that scared some people off,” and he wasn’t beyond speaking negatively about the productions that he’d appeared in, the people he’d made them with, or even the studios and networks he made them for.
He’d slammed Paramount for the way it had marketed 1976’s Lifeguard, one of his first major leading roles on the big screen, and he could feel the “bad vibes” when he spoke to a pair of high-flying filmmakers a couple of years later, when they were assembling the cast for an adventure flick called Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“I sat across the street three years ago with Lucas and Spielberg,” Elliott recalled in early 1985. “They kind of started with this same kind of questioning, and I was stupid enough to tell them what I thought.” All they did was ask him about his career, and the actor came to realise that, in this case, honesty was not the best policy.
“Lucas is sitting back there and giving me his beady little eye look, thinking, ‘Who’s this cocky jerk sitting across from me?'” he remembered. “I knew when I left there, ‘You ain’t gonna get this role’. I should have spent 25 minutes telling Lucas about seeing Star Wars six times. One of the greatest westerns I had ever seen.”
With that, Elliott had shot himself in the foot and sabotaged himself out of a part in the first Indiana Jones flick. While he didn’t reveal what character he was reading for, the chances are high that he wouldn’t have been back for the sequels anyway, since Harrison Ford’s legendary adventurer didn’t have any recurring companions who were played by Southern gentleman.
Still, all he did was shoot from the hip, which was apparently more enough to convince George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that he wasn’t the guy they were looking for.
